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The boulevard through
Ocean City came to an end and I continued on highway 13, which continued
down through Maryland. It is a beautiful drive, well worth taking, including
some real lonely two-lane stuff. What I was discovering at this point
was that a lot of the backroads are a lot smoother than the highways;
they're simply in better shape.
Pretty
soon I came upon the end of Maryland.
The problem with driving to the southern tip of Maryland is that it dead-ends into a bunch of water. This little pond is affectionately known by the locals as Chesapeake Bay.
Chesapeake Bay is a big, long, wind-whipped body of water. In olden days, it must've been a bitch to cross. However, modern man has come up with an ingenious device called the "bridge," which in this case is more like a very long elevated highway than the bridges I've come to know in New York. By elevated, by the way, we're talking maybe twenty feet above the water. By comparison, the BQE is 40 to 50 feet above most of Brooklyn and Queens.
Oh, and the civil engineers didn't just make a bridge over the water from Townsend to Norfolk, no sir! They decided to call it the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. And, yes, it actually does go under water. Twice!
Click the thumbnail for a slideshow.
For the record, I took these pictures on the trip home, because it was raining pretty good on the outbound trip.
In fact, after paying my toll and getting about halfway across the bridge -- at this point wondering what the hell a "bridge-tunnel" actually is, I came upon the first of two tunnels. Traffic was slowed down because they while the bridge is a divided four-lane deal, the tunnels are only one lane each way and they were doing work in the first tunnel.
After coming out of the tunnel, I found I was being rained on. Not hard, but more than I wanted to endure for the next 13 miles, so I stopped at the first emergency pull-over and got out my raingear. It was raining pretty hard by the time I got the gear on and I took off. Sometime in the middle of the second tunnel, it dawned on me that I hadn't secured my duffel bag after getting the rain gear out... which meant I'd now lost a bag with my chaps AND my heated gear!
Coming to the end of the
bridge, my plan was to get gas, turn around, beg my way out of a toll
and make the whole round trip again to look for the bag. After all, how
far could it have gone? And it was important.
After getting gas (quickly), I came back to the Virginia-side tollbooth and exlained my situation. The toll booth attendant insisted I pull in at the little police station there and inquire about my bag, under the belief this was a matter for the officials. So I pulled in and a cop that was idling in his patrol car got out and wanted to know what I needed. I explained my situation. He asked if I could describe the bag and where I lost it. Well, yes, officer -- I left it at the first emergency pull-over after the first tunnel and I proceeded to describe the bag and its contents.
"Do
you need a hero today?"
What the hell? Do I need a hero? No, not particularly, I just need to go get my damn bag, I thought But even as I was thinking this, the officer popped open his rearseat door and pulled my bag out! Turns out he'd been about five minutes behind me and that lost items happen all the time.
I was extremely thankful to get that bag back and let the nice man know it. I figure he saved me a lot of misery and grief over the next couple of days.
Unfortunately, I had some misery and grief ahead of me at the end of the bridge-tunnel. The Norfolk-Virginia Beach metro area is a horrible tangle of roads and highways, all of them crammed with speeding commuters and marked by contradictory roadsigns. In trying to get to highway 17 I spent two hours trying to get through and out of that area. At one point, I was headed northeast and the road markers were telling me I was on a south-bound highway! Of all the roads I travelled on my trip, this area is definitely the hands-down worst.
Well, I finally got through that area and booked it down 17. Around 6 o'clock, I started looking for a hotel, figuring I should be able to find one pretty quick. Remember how I said I should've called ahead?
Well, an hour and a half and seven hotels later, I finally got a tip that a Comfort Inn in the neighboring town had two rooms left. I zipped on over there and snagged their last one for the night. I asked the desk clerk what the deal with all the full hotels was and she reminded me of something I should've already realized: with the recent storm, the hotels were full of emergency workers and displaced families. Ah.
This was not the last time I would run into effects from the hurricane. But in the meantime, I spent a restful night in Williamston, NC at what turned out to be a very nice place and got on the road again the next morning toward Myrtle Beach, where I was to meet my sister.
